


land without mercy

by arbitrarily



Category: Fargo (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Attempted Murder as Love Language, Canon-Typical Content, Choking, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Period-Typical Attitudes, Stabbing, Wound Care as Foreplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:23:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27135197
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Rabbi, Calamita, and a history of violence.
Relationships: Constant Calamita/Rabbi Milligan
Comments: 11
Kudos: 42





	land without mercy

**Author's Note:**

> Me dealing with the existential dread of both what became Election Week and just this long slow march through 2020: let's write some real nasty fic. All of which is to say, I see two dudes who want to kill each other and I think, "that's romance, baby." 
> 
> There is a whole lot of "yikes!" abounding in here, namely what with all the stabbing and the fingering of wounds and the blood and attempted murder, y'know. The fun stuff. Additional content warnings can be found in the end note.
> 
> Last, there is no way in hell this won't be rendered AU following the remaining episodes left in the season. This was written as of 4x08 "The Nadir," (though started in fits and starts way before that), so consider this fic just to be hanging out in its own universe, removed from anything that comes canonically after.

You’re going to reap just what you sow.  
“Perfect Day,” LOU REED

In the beginning, as good a place to start as any.

In the beginning, his father loved stories about rabbits. Owney Milligan, whiskey hot in his gullet, liked to talk about rabbits. Hunting them, catching them, chasing them. Killing them. He liked to talk about rabbits, almost as if they were people. It was back then, back when he was still a boy, when he was still named Patrick, that he could first recall hearing those stories. And it was later, when they started to call him Rabbi, that his father looked to him across his table, the wood warped, knife-gouged and scarred, and said, “You boy, are no rabbit.” Never son, always boy. Never a rabbit either, apparently.

To this day, Rabbi Milligan had no idea what that was supposed to mean.

He drove, the kid beside him. Night came on early this late in December and the only bit of the country that existed for them now was the slice of road illuminated by the car’s headlights. They traveled along it, further down it, and the dark of the night held around them.

“Where are we going?” Satchel asked, not for the first time.

Rabbi flexed his fingers against the steering wheel, stiff with both the cold and the tension coiling tight within him. “We'll know when we get there, won’t we?”

Satchel watched out the sideview mirror. There was nothing behind them but the night.

“Is anybody gonna come for us?”

Rabbi chose not to answer him.

It was 1945. On Boss’s command, delivered via Ebal, Rabbi and Calamita went to meet with the Chicago syndicate. Don Fadda’s marching orders were to, simply put, “Finish it.” They had been bickering over trucking routes for as long as the Nazis had marched on Europe. Post-V-E Day now, and with the boys coming home the time had come to strike. It was time, like the rest of the country, to usher in a brand new era.

Ebal had already done most of the negotiation work with the Chicago consigliere, a handlebar-mustachioed relic from the Old Country. Chicago favored measured discussion and bloodshed in the form of lost profit than anything so intimately violent. They were there, Rabbi knew, to show him that men could bleed in the conventional way, too.

Rabbi did not sit. He remained standing beside Calamita, his eyes trained on the scuffed black and white tile floor. Though conversation was delivered solely in Italian, with Rabbi understanding only every third word, he was more than able to see it was over before it had even begun. No one wanted to cooperate. Everyone always wanted the biggest piece for themselves. Rabbi shot a look at Calamita out of the corner of his eye. He could hear it in his voice—Calamita’s limited reserve of patience was waning, fast. Hell, he already had his knife out. He spoke as precisely and sharp as the blade of that knife, growing more amused the closer they came to unavoidable altercation. Rabbi had it on all too good authority Calamita was the sort who liked to play with his food before he ate. Still, Rabbi did not say a word. He never did at these meets. Once they got a listen to his accent, all he became was the butt of any joke from the Boot.

This time, though, it was Calamita they thought they could go after.

“Listen to the paisan,” the shorter of the pair from Chicago said. Their consigliere, seated off to the side by the bar, shook his head. Smarter, maybe, than Rabbi initially gave him credit. He saw what was coming, too. “Listen. He speaks Italian like he learned it at New York Harbor!” He smacked his pal on the arm, the both of them laughing. The consigliere sipped his coffee very deliberately, his gaze never leaving Calamita.

Rabbi himself went very still. He could feel the shape and the weight of his piece pressed under his arm, still sheathed in his shoulder holster. He watched Calamita too, instead of the boys from Chicago. Calamita laughed softly and Rabbi groaned inwardly. He knew what came next.

Calamita liked to think he had wisdom. To Rabbi, at first, young and uninitiated, he did.

“People, they think it is a kind person who takes in an orphan,” Calamita said to him once. “That it is somebody who is nice. It is not. It is only somebody who sees a use. They can look at a baby, a baby with nobody or nothing and think—that baby? That can be useful.” He paused. “These are not good people.”

It was years after Rabbi had been brought in to the Fadda household that Calamita told him that and of the two of them it was Rabbi who was wiser. He knew to look for the jagged edge in what Calamita said, try to sort out the warning or the threat. Both. He couldn’t find either.

They were at Joplin’s, Rabbi behind the counter, cleaning the glassware. Calamita sat before him, drinking. Calamita did not get drunk. He was a measured man, even in vice. He sipped at his grappa slowly and precisely. The other men in the Fadda ranks liked to joke behind his back, sober as the pope. They’d laugh he never even took a girl. But by then Rabbi knew the truth of that particular matter.

He also knew Calamita’s story. Constant Calamita came to the Fadda family as a boy. A five year-old child sent alone by train from New York to Kansas City where the New York bosses had tasked Don Fadda to, quote, take the boy and do something with him. The boy, tall for his age already, did not speak any English. Fresh off the boat, he was taken in by fellow Italian immigrants who, while they did not want him, could see a use. That use took him west. It remained unclear to Rabbi if it was Don Fadda who took a liking to Calamita or if it was Calamita who took a shine to the Faddas, Kansas City, or both, but he did not return to New York. He stayed. He had no Old Country to miss same as there was no family to ache for. He was alone. That was good; he told Rabbi that too, a different time. He was no longer a child but well into his twenties, Rabbi a skinny teenager with no Old Country, no family, a gun in his hand instead.

“You only can survive it alone,” Calamita had said, “one step ahead,” and here endeth the lesson.

Calamita—he liked to push. He liked questions without easy answers, the violence that came in the space of a held breath, the drop of a stomach in dread, before the actual brutality intended.

Calamita had wanted war for as long as Rabbi had known him. He had thrilled at the opportunity of it against Rabbi’s family, and as the Cannon Limited rose up in Kansas City, he wanted to stamp them out from the start.

“Boss, he is a good man. But he likes his peace too much.” He pointed at Rabbi with his sharpened nail file. “It costs him.”

After seven years with the Faddas, Rabbi knew Calamita liked to say these things in his presence, usually expecting an answer. A test of loyalty, perhaps.

“Peace turns its own profit,” Rabbi said. They were alone in Rabbi’s attic room. Rabbi was hanging out his sparse laundry before the open window, the damp warmth of an August evening making him prickle with sweat. Calamita sat at his table in the lone chair. He filled the space in here effortlessly; he sat as if every bit of it belonged to him, under his domain. As if that domain included Rabbi himself. It was almost domestic: the heat of both the day and the room had them both in rolled shirtsleeves, languid and very nearly relaxed.

Calamita continued to file his nails. He curled his fingers, flexed them, inspected his handiwork. He finally lifted his head, looked over his shoulder at Rabbi. “Loss too though, yeah?”

“Was that guy really dead?” Satchel asked. Ice pebbled and skipped off the dirty windshield.

Rabbi continued to drive. He hunched over the steering wheel. He knew the kid meant Antoon. He thought about saying nothing, protecting him more than he already had, but that wasn’t protection—it was cowardice. “Yeah,” he finally said.

“Are you gonna get in trouble? With the police?”

“In my experience, the law doesn’t much care what we do to each other so long as there’s no collateral damage to finer society.”

“What?”

“Police don’t care about Antoon. Don’t care about me and you neither.”

There was nothing then but the sound of the road under the tires and the cold wind whipping past.

“Did you really kill your own dad?”

Rabbi set his jaw. He knew the kid had to have been sitting on that particular question for some time. “Yeah. I did.”

“Why?” Satchel’s voice cracked, the question incredulous.

There was no answer for that, not a real one nor one he was willing to give. “It’s like I told you, kid. You play the cards you’re dealt.”

“Did they make you do it? The Italians?”

“Nah.” Rabbi’s mouth attempted a grin, abandoned it. “Well, they mighta done, push come to shove, but no. I was amenable.” He glanced over at the kid. A frown indented between his eyebrows, his mouth turned down. Hard to see more than that in the dark. Rabbi turned back to the road. “My da, he was no good, you see.”

“And they were better?”

It was a damned good question. “Sometimes it’s not a question of better, but,” Rabbi trailed off.

"But what?”

“I don’t know. What a man wants, I suppose.”

He was with Calamita, and with the both of them was a man doomed to die. This was a test, but then most things with Calamita were. Calamita was often in pursuit of all the ways that Rabbi was still wanting.

It was a gloomy late October day, 1939, the sky gray and overcast. Loomed too close above the diminished tree canopy as they tromped through the woods. Oranges and dulled reds surrounded them, most of the leaves already fallen, kicked up by their unhurried footsteps. Their quarry led, praying. Rapid-fire and barely audible, the occasional plea Rabbi heard to both the man’s own mother and Mother Mary. Nothing doing. When he switched to Italian, desperate now, Calamita gave him a sharp shove between his shoulder blades. The man stumbled in the leaves; he kicked up dirt along with the damp foliage, but managed to stay standing.

“That’s enough of that,” Calamita said. “It is embarrassing.” That was when the man began to cry.

He said nothing more until Calamita made them stop. No prayers this time, only pleading. He turned his attention to Rabbi, as it was Rabbi with the gun in his hand. He begged him not to kill him. “Irish, please. Come on. Come on, you know me, Milligan. You know me.” And Rabbi did know him, which meant he knew Calamita’s assertion of backstabbing treachery and Boss’s agreement with it was most like correct. Didn’t make it any easier. Didn’t make the fella stop begging.

He begged more than the Moskowitz kid had, but then, if memory served—and how it served and it served and it served—he had done little more than cry, small scared whimpers as he cowered back from him. Him and his father and and the gun. For a long time after, Rabbi spent each night before sleep claimed him trying to absolve himself of what he’d done. The guilt gnawed hungrily at him, ate him from the inside out. He saw the kid, his glasses, the swollen eye beneath. The blood, after the gun fired. It was the glasses, the helpless, defenseless nature of the poor fuck, that was what he always returned to, dread leaden and heavy inside him. It wasn’t until he was taken into the Fadda household that he stopped.

“You do what you have to do, that is all.” It was Calamita who told him that, and Rabbi took it to heart. He had so few things to take there, to keep there, that he greedily took this one in. No absolution, only resignation. A man did as he had to. Rabbi did what he had to do. That was all anyone could do, what was necessary.

He never once thought of his father, not like that.

“You have to point the gun,” Calamita said now. “If you intend to shoot.”

Rabbi lifted his arm. The shot echoed.

Rabbi was not family. That much was made abundantly clear to him. He was no Fadda.

There existed a carefully enforced hierarchy within the family, and Rabbi was outside of it. A fate worse, Calamita told him, than even the bottom rung. Calamita hadn’t used the word _rung_ though—he had said _stair_ , and Rabbi made the mistake of correcting him.

Rabbi’s status went unchanged after he killed his father. He stayed in the attic room, he remained alone. You couldn’t trust a man, even a boy, willing to kill his own kin. A boy who would kill his father—that was a curse.

At first, newly returned to his rightful family, Josto liked to talk about Rabbi’s father in front of Rabbi. He was trying to prove something, Rabbi could see that much. Didn’t pardon the sickening knot in his stomach that sometimes he mistook for guilt and other times for homesickness. Josto knew Rabbi’s father better than Rabbi ever had and he wanted to make sure Rabbi knew it. He wanted him to know that Owney Milligan had seen something in Josto that he liked, something he could never find in Rabbi.

The lighting was low and it took little effort to smell the ghost of gunpowder and spilled blood here in Joplin’s. Josto had invited Rabbi to his table, and there he sat, obedient and trapped. He listened to stories of his father told from the boy who had slept in his old bed. When Rabbi looked up, he found Calamita grinning at him, all teeth. Bared, as if prepared to bite and drag at a hind leg. Rabbi blinked, he looked back down. _Not a rabbit_ , he reminded himself, for good and for ill.

Satchel, Rabbi learned, had a care for names. He liked them. One afternoon, Rabbi had left the kid under Ebal’s watchful, though reluctant, eye. Ebal spent their time together running through his family tree, Satchel seemingly fascinated by the vast array of Italian syllables and names Ebal recited.

So when Satchel asked him, “Did your parents name you Rabbi?” it was not entirely unexpected.

Rabbi set the screwdriver down on the windowsill. They were in the small back parlor and the latch on the window had come loose. Behind him, Satchel sat perched in a wingback armchair, his body poised carefully on the very edge of the cushion, prepared to leap to his feet at a moment’s notice.

"Nah. Nickname. Earned it, I suppose you could say.” He glanced back at the kid.

“Then,” and Satchel frowned. “What’s your real name?”

“Rabbi is my real name, or real enough. I answer to it, all a name is in the end, isn’t it?” He turned back to the window, satisfied with his work. He slipped the screwdriver back into the toolkit.

Beyond the open door at his back, he could hear movement in the house. Rabbi all too often lived like a mouse, slipping along the baseboards of the Fadda house, ready to skitter and hide to prevent confrontation. Someone was coming down the hall. He recognized the footfall.

“But what did your mom call you? Like, when you were born?”

“Patrick.” Even expecting it, Rabbi started at the voice from the doorway. Over his shoulder, he looked. Confirmed. Calamita, sure enough. Rabbi wasn’t quick enough to stop the frown that crossed his face. He didn’t think he had ever heard Calamita use that name before. It’d been years, hell, decades, since anyone had.

Satchel blinked up, first at Calamita and then at Rabbi.

“That’s right,” Rabbi said to Satchel.

“Boss wants you.”

“Alright, kid. Let’s move.” Satchel was already on his feet, ready.

“He wants you.”

“You offering to babysit?” As if Rabbi would dare trust Calamita with the kid. Worst case scenario, he’d come home to a corpse. Second worse, he’d return to a stone cold killer ready to commit patricide and any other variety of sin at minimal provocation.

Calamita ignored Satchel, looked only at Rabbi. “Naneeda is in the front room, with the television.”

Rabbi got to his feet. “TV time it is.” He placed a hand on Satchel’s shoulder, kept himself between Calamita and the kid. “Make sure you do your reading though. You’re gonna tell me all about the Dickens when I get back.” He gestured to the well-worn copy of _A Tale of Two Cities_ in Satchel’s hands. Rabbi’s own copy.

“It’s boring.”

“It isn’t, but you can tell me about that too.” They continued down the hall. Rabbi paused when they reached the front door. “If I’m not back, I’m dead or in jail. Be good.”

He got into the car with Calamita. Without asking, he knew they were headed to the club.

“I see you playing house with the mulignan,” Calamita said. “You think you are his papa now?”

Rabbi shook his head. “None of that. I’m just trying to clear the way for him, make his time easy, if I can.”

“Yes, because nobody did for you. Poor, poor Irish.” It was unclear if that was mockery alone in Calamita’s voice, but like most things about him, Rabbi didn’t trust it. He knew Calamita was trying to lead him out to the edge, into an empty clearing in the forest, and sooner rather than later, he would fire the killing shot. He knew a lot of things when it came to Calamita, and very few of them were any good.

Thanksgiving, 1950. The kid ate his sandwich in silence. There was a quiet gloom to him that was well-familiar to this room. Satchel sighed heavily, set his half-eaten sandwich down.

“Did they make you eat up here too? When you were little?”

“They did,” Rabbi said.

There was something the kid was working out—Rabbi could see it in his face. He finally looked up at him. “Did you have to do it alone?”

“Sometimes.” Not a lie. Rabbi was uninterested in telling him, or anyone else, anything more. When Rabbi had first been brought into this family, that cold early winter of 1934, Calamita had at first made him into his own personal amusement. He’d poke at him, prod, try to frighten him, knock him off-center. See what an animal would do when trapped into a corner. Rabbi made for an easy mark; he was afraid of everything. Despite the specific loneliness that came with such a thing as being a child exchanged for another, the Moskowitz family had been warm. They took him in and treated him as a son, more so than Owney Milligan ever had. Maybe that was why the betrayal stuck tight to him, painful and personal. Why he had been trying to make up for it ever since, always coming up short. But the Fadda family made sure he knew his place. Don Fadda would only ever ask for him when he wanted intel, wanted insight into Rabbi’s father, his top lieutenants, his operation. The consigliere was kind enough, if not brusque. Each conversation with him was interrogatory, the facts only. Calamita was another story. The first Thanksgiving Rabbi spent with the Faddas, in the exact same place he spent it with Satchel now, he had just turned sixteen, gawky and awkward as anything. Uncertain to the point of violence, as if he could be made capable of anything. Maybe that was what Calamita saw in him. Maybe that was the flame he kept trying to ignite.

That Thanksgiving, the door opened with a noisy clatter and there was Calamita on the threshold. He had never come up here before. No one had. He was still dressed smart as a pin despite having spent hours at the Fadda table, groaning under the weight of their holiday feast.

“This is where you sleep?” He said it sly and smug, the set-up to a joke that excluded Rabbi despite being about him. Rabbi shrugged.

Calamita stepped into the room, tall enough that his head could brush the sloping, gabled ceiling. “The poor Irish fuck, all alone for holidays.” He rubbed his hands together. “It is too fucking cold in here,” he said. He wasn’t wrong; it was freezing.

“I turned the radiator on, but,” and Rabbi shrugged again. “Nothing doing.”

Calamita clucked his tongue. He turned back from the drafty window to face Rabbi. “Poor boy, cold and alone in his bed.” Rabbi didn’t know better, not then. He didn’t know how to cross-examine the things that Calamita said and did to him, not yet. All he knew was the hair stood up along the back of his neck and he did not dislike it.

The next night, Calamita stopped by again. The door was thrown open yet again, no knock. He tossed a hot water bottle at him. Rabbi startled, barely caught it in both hands. He held it gently then, damn near reverently. It was embarrassing, stupid, really, how much it meant to Rabbi. He knew it then, but he could not remember the last time anyone had given him anything. Not without a price. He said thank you, quietly, looking down at the faded red hot water bottle instead of at Calamita. Just as well. When he finally did look up, he found Calamita’s face closed-off, tight.

Calamita pursed his lips. “So you do not die,” he said. “Not yet. Not before you are useful.”

He drove down the main thoroughfare in a small rural town in Kansas. He pulled into a dusty lot covered in a thin clean layer of snow. Rabbi parked the car, turned off the ignition. The quiet here was bleak and total. A boardinghouse loomed before them, the land around it flat and endless.

He turned to Satchel beside him. “Ground rules, kid. We lay low, we make no friends and even fewer enemies. We never tell anybody anything. Capisce?” He waited until Satchel nodded.

“Capisce.”

Rabbi’s face softened some. “Now. I ain’t trying to scare you any, but when I tell you to run, you go. No questions. No looking over your shoulder. None of that. You’re off, you’re out of here." Rabbi reached into his coat pocket. "I’m gonna give you some cash, and tonight we can talk about a plan, if you want one.” The cold from outside began to creep into the car. Fear was wide and open in Satchel’s eyes as he took the money. He held it away from himself, as if it might bite. “Just in case, not that you’ll be most like needing it,” he added, unconvincing even to himself.

Rabbi reached for the door handle. “Oh, and one last thing—anybody asks? Your name is Michael.”

“Irish. Hey, Irish.” Joplin’s; Rabbi was unloading crates behind the bar. Seated in front of him with a rapidly emptying bottle of limoncello: Gaetano. Rabbi had made it his mission since his arrival to avoid Gaetano best he could, but neither the Fadda household nor Kansas City itself was big enough to achieve the proper distance. Rabbi lifted his head, met Gaetano’s eye. Wished he hadn’t.

"Working hard, yes? That’s good. The Irish, they are hard-working people I am told.” Rabbi had nothing to say to that, so he didn’t. “I knew an Irish once. Before you. Yes, yes, I did. He was a scrawny thing, like a sick cat. Red hair and the freckles, ugly as sin.” He paused, considering Rabbi with enough scrutiny to make Rabbi feel as if he was holding his breath. “You are not ugly though—are you, Irish?”

Gaetano’s eyes widened in expectation, wanting an answer. “Can’t say I ever gave it much thought,” Rabbi finally said.

Gaetano laughed, one quick chuckle. He threw back the liquid in his glass and then poured more. “Calamita,” he called. “Calamita!”

At the opposite end of the bar, Calamita scarcely reacted. He didn’t have to; his attention had been on the conversation from the start. You knew when you had someone like Calamita’s attention. It was like a heavy hand settled on the nape of your neck. Rabbi knew the sensation well.

“Yes?”

Gaetano pointed at Rabbi. “Is this one ugly?”

Calamita was slow to move, his gaze rising from his open newspaper to first Gaetano and then Rabbi. Rabbi worked hard not to think of each and every perverse half-compliment that had passed from Calamita’s lips over the years, tucked away in that attic bedroom like the worst sort of secret. He had called him pretty, more than once, always when Rabbi’s face was flushed, with both shame and something baser. As Calamita took what he wanted from him. Nothing about Calamita’s manner or face betrayed him now. At last, Calamita shrugged. He returned back to the newspaper he had been reading. “He dresses like a hobo living on the street,” he said.

Gaetano laughed, harder than the comment warranted. “Yes! You dress like a hobo, yes. The clothes make the man, they say, and,” he shrugged too, far more theatrical than Calamita. Gaetano cut his laughter short and leaned forward, his face falling from brutish glee to something worse. Bullish, meant to provoke if not hurt. “The Irish I know, you know what he does to me? I tell you. He wait until I am asleep and then he goes and he tries to steal my boots. My boots, I tell you. They were all I had. And he come to me in the night and try to take them off of me.” Gaetano shook his head. “What do you have to say for that?”

“A thousand apologies,” Rabbi said, studiously casual.

“And I appreciate it, I do. You know what I do to him though? My thief? I kick him, boots still on. I kick his nose into the back of his head.” Gaetano’s shoulders shifted, nearly a shrug. “He die like that.”

Calamita was no longer reading. He was watching Rabbi. He was waiting to see what he would do, what Gaetano might do to him in turn. Rabbi carefully set down the clean glass. “Deserving nothing less, I should suppose.”

Gaetano wagged a finger in Rabbi’s direction. “You, I like. The Irish, they are not so bad, no? They have Catholics there, in Ireland. I can only ever trust a Catholic. We are watched over by the same God.” He took another lusty draw of his drink. “Are you a Catholic, Irish?”

Rabbi gave a quick nod. “I keep my Bible by the bedside,” he replied. He sent up a silent prayer to any God including the one Gaetano invoked that He did not in fact watch over him. Not the things he had done. Not if he ever once hoped for salvation. 

Rabbi jerked awake. Seated beside the bed, Calamita. Rabbi settled back against his pillow, his heart still racing. As it had for the last year, the present rushed to meet him, erase what he had dreamt. His family was dead. His father, murdered. This was his home, now and for keeps.

“You have bad dreams?” Calamita said. He made a small _tsk_ noise. “When I sleep. I only have the two dreams. In the one? I am chased by a tiger. In the other? I am the tiger. I wake up, I am hungry for a steak.”

Typical Calamita. “What d’you want?” Rabbi grumbled, still thick with sleep.

Calamita said, “Nothing,” and then he said, “Go back to sleep.”

One of those full-throated dame singers was crooning on the radio, scratchy and lamenting love gone poorly. Wasn’t the only thing to listen to here; sound came from below and above, the rooms on either side of him. The walls were thin here. Rabbi sat by his lonesome, in one of the upstairs rooms at Janine’s cathouse. A loud squeal came from down the hall. Rabbi ignored it, considered instead the calendar pinned to the wall straight ahead. Bleach-blonde pin-up, tits out, nipples covered with tinsel pasties, a Santa hat perched crooked on her head, felt tree covering her naked crotch. December 1946, only three months out of date.

Rabbi cocked his head, eyes narrowing. She looked some like the girl Josto had corralled for Calamita. Unfortunately, Rabbi could say with a good degree of certainty, she wasn’t his type at all. Buxom, brassy. Loud. Calamita’s taste ran more along a knife-blade: sharp, angular, liable to cut. Male, not female.

He could hear them, on the other side of the wall beside his chair. Rabbi himself had waved off his chosen companion, settled in with a bottle of whiskey and his own company, the window opened to the crisp night air. Sounds from the street down below, car horns, yelling, lifted to him, though not near enough to drown out the noises within. The noises on the other side of the wall.

“What’s the matter, handsome?” He heard that, the purr of her voice, pitched to carry. As put-on as the rouge she wore. Whatever Calamita said in reply was inaudible, just a low and familiar murmur. Rabbi didn’t have a name for what he felt as he tried to listen, because that was what he was doing. No pretense here: he was eavesdropping, the spy and the rat all his detractors claimed him to be.

“I seen you out there,” the girl was saying, an attempt at both cajoling and calming, succeeding at neither. “I got your number, baby. You want me to go and find the Mick for you? Swap places, him instead of me?”

A thump against the wall, gave Rabbi a jolt. Liquid heat pooled in his stomach, and he knew better—wasn’t on account of the rye. It was anticipation. Again, he could not make out what Calamita said, only the sibilant slur of his voice. Made the hair on his arms stand on end. A thump again, heavy and bodily—for emphasis maybe—and the woman laughed. His eyes drifted to the calendar, and it was all too easy to imagine all manner of violence committed against her. Calamita’s wide hands and long fingers locked around her throat. Those same hands caught and pulling at her hair. Holding her down. The longer he looked and the more he imagined, the less he saw of her. Rabbi closed his eyes. The track his imagination ran now was well-worn and all the more unforgivable for it. His pa had liked to say, the greater sin was what the mind could conjure than the body. The doing, at the least, made you more than craven.

“You say so,” the broad was saying. “But I got the proof right here to the contrary. Can’t even rise to the occasion, can you?”

A harder thump, followed by harder laughter. He wanted to tell her to stop. There was nothing to be gained through further provocation, not when it came to Calamita.

Instead, his own door settled and creaked as the adjacent room’s door opened first, then, slammed shut.Rabbi drank what remained in the glass, focused on the burn as it went down. His cheeks were flushed. He got to his feet, slowly. He moved over to the window and parted the thin and faded curtain. He peeked out. And there was Calamita, stepping out into the street, slipping his hat back on. Down in the dirty slush, his back to the building, smoke rose above his head.

The first time Calamita touched him, Rabbi was bleeding out in the attic of the Faddas’ house.

Bleeding out, Calamita would have said, was an exaggeration. While it was a fairly long cut, a knife wound delivered to Rabbi’s side that stretched towards his middle, it was not nearly as deep as it felt. “Stop that sniveling, you are not dying,” Calamita had sneered at him in the back of the car as Paolo drove. He held his hand over Rabbi’s hands though, the both of them together covering the wound as he bled.

Blood streaked his bedding now, after Calamita had unceremoniously settled him onto the narrow bunk, and it was that he oddly fixated on—how would he be able to get it to come clean? Rabbi took great care with the few belongings that were his. In his five years spent with the Faddas, he had collected so little.

Calamita stood back. He looked down at Rabbi’s prone body. He had helped Rabbi up the stairs, with far less caution than Rabbi might have liked. Each step jarred his body, made the wound weep more blood. His legs unreliable, as rubbery as his head felt woozy. All it was meant to be tonight was collection. Hand over the money for the Faddas’ protection. They crossed the wrong bookie on the wrong night and all Rabbi got for his trouble was a knife to the side. The bookie got far worse.

Calamita nodded at him. “You have to clean that up. You get infection.” Calamita said that last bit in a mocking sing-song. Even Rabbi’s exhale of breath sounded pathetic. He could barely sit up. He could barely look at the wound, mean and open, still bleeding, his gorge rising each time he tried to tend to it.

Calamita clucked his tongue and then he sighed, both beleaguered and annoyed. He held his coat away from his body, where Rabbi’s blood had left it ruined, shiny and darker. He was measured and unhurried as he moved. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, his hat relegated to the floor of the car and long forgotten.

“You let me,” he said, more demand than offer.

Calamita made for as terrible a nurse as Rabbi might have guessed. There was no sympathy to found with him, none to court, but that was hardly situational. His hands were ruthless on his body, moving him and arranging him without a care for the bitten-off pained noises Rabbi made. He removed Rabbi’s shirt with the same precision he had removed his coat. Only then, Rabbi’s chest bared, ribs stark through his skin, all bone and very little muscle, did Calamita consider the wound.

“You are very lucky, Irish. It missed the good stuff, hidden inside of you.”

He then traced the tip of his finger over where the skin parted, ragged and ugly. His touch was featherlight, impossibly gentle. Made Rabbi hiss through his teeth all the same. His stomach muscles fluttered and clenched. Calamita pulled back just as suddenly. He grabbed the small first-aid kit Rabbi kept under his sink. Not much in it, other than iodine, some gauze, mercurochrome swabs. Rabbi jerked his head away, unable to watch him as he cleaned the cut. He closed his eyes tight, bit the inside of his lip against the sharp pain, the burn of it, as Calamita wiped him down with something that stung. He tried to breathe evenly yet found he couldn’t. Instead he tried to lose himself in the awfulness of Calamita’s voice, as he spoke. He was telling him a story. He was nine years old, he said, the first time someone took a knife to him. Ruined his shirt, a real pity. His voice was both very far away and entirely too close. “You must lead a pretty life for yourself, Rabbi, if this is the first time somebody try to cut you open.”

Rabbi didn’t argue with him, even if it wasn’t true. The pretty life part, that was—Calamita was right about the other. He had never been cut, not like this. It wasn’t on account of any charmed life, but rather care. He was careful. He weighed the odds before he played. There was no point in explaining any of that, not to him.

Calamita worked as efficiently as he did anything else. There was a poetic justice of a kind to be found in his ability to patch up a man as well as he could take him apart. That thought was slightly easier to hold onto than anything worse. Anything like the peculiar intimacy of Calamita’s hands on him. One spanned the cut of Rabbi’s hip as he held him down, held him steady. Rabbi was skinny enough it was all too easy to picture the wide span of Calamita’s hands covering his chest entirely. Wrapped around his throat. Rabbi’s cheeks felt over-warm and he could not decide what to blame for it. Nobody touched him. No one wanted him. Maybe it was as simple as having the heat of another this close, on him, that could make him want—what, exactly? Even here, pinned and wounded, Calamita close enough he could feel his breath on his clammy skin, he could not admit it. 

It became worse when Calamita’s fingers poked unexpectedly at the cleaned wound. When they poked inside of him. Rabbi’s eyes flew open and he moaned, sick with it, pain and something uglier. He closed his eyes again when he saw what Calamita was doing, the way his two fingers disappeared inside of his own body. It was a violation, he told himself. It was unbearable. Calamita made a quiet humming noise, as if deep in thought. There always was a detached yet hungry curiosity when it came to Calamita and violence. His fingers prodded at the private, angry red flesh never meant to be seen. He made a mess of his work, opened the gash wide, nothing rushed or frantic in his movement, but rather, slow—tender even. He was reverential as he further rent his flesh and Rabbi groaned loudly, as if in reply to a lover.

“Yes, that’s nice,” Calamita said, only making it worse. Calamita’s concept of nice was nothing to be trusted. The man himself, nothing to be trusted. Rabbi’s watched through half-lidded eyes as Calamita’s own fixed on the length of Rabbi’s throat, traced down to his trembling and pale abdomen, the blood-stained skin. Where his fingers were tucked inside of him. “Very pretty,” he said. Pain gripped Rabbi tight, wrung him out from the inside.

“Please,” Rabbi said, but he did not know what he was asking for.

Rabbi’s skin prickled with sweat, something hideous and wrong swelling in him. He both recoiled and leaned into Calamita as he drew his fingers from his body. Fresh blood spilled, and Rabbi must have made a noise. His hand reached and latched onto Calamita’s arm, up near his shoulder. Calamita let him. He exhaled noisily when Rabbi touched him, Rabbi too lost to give it much thought. Rabbi himself was desperate enough, he was willing to accept even this. Up here in this room, far away from the rest of the family.

“You sick fuck.” They were close enough now that when Calamita spoke his mouth moved along the cut of Rabbi’s jaw. His nose bumped against his ear, Calamita’s breath coming fast now against the side of his face. His hand, still blood-stained, pressed down along the inseam of Rabbi’s trousers. Rabbi’s fingers dug in deeper along Calamita’s arm, pulling at the shoulder of his shirt. “You like this.”

And he did. He was so aroused, he felt sick with it. Sick with himself. Calamita cocked his head, smiled small as he looked down the length of Rabbi’s body. The pain was a persistent pulse inside him, accompanied by an equally overwhelming tide of want. He made a decision then. The absence of action against, that was a choice. Acquiescence, a choice. He closed his eyes. He felt Calamita’s weight at his side, the banked heat of him. He felt his fingers work his trousers open and then felt the dry but warm width of them as he gripped his cock. Rabbi whined, the sound catching in his throat.

If he had a better sense of both himself and Calamita in the moment, he might’ve expected him to chide him for it. His eagerness, his willingness to give himself over. But Calamita was quiet, the only change in him the tightness and insistence of his hand as he worked his cock, the way his breath went labored and panting, a hunger of his own to be slaked.

Rabbi lost track of time. He lost track of himself. He was made senseless and stupid as Calamita worked him.

Coming felt equally visceral, as raw and aching as the wound sliced into him. Rabbi made noises as if he was crying and Calamita kept trying to quiet him. The hand held over Rabbi’s mouth was both chemical and animal, the stench of iodine and the taste of his own blood, Calamita’s flesh. His teeth sunk in, and it was Calamita who made noise now, as if he too had been cut open.

He was scarcely aware of his own body, after. He laid there on his bunk, barely breathing. He was entirely still as Calamita tended to him. He cleaned both the wound and the blood; he wiped up the spilled come, the dried sweat. He did it all without comment. He wiped at his body the same way one might care for a body before burial.

The pain came back to him along with his body, his better senses, deep into the night. But by then, Rabbi was alone.

Rabbi’s sexual experience was severely limited. Not long after he’d killed his father, Josto had taken him out for a night with the boys. Rabbi found himself in a claustrophobically small bedroom full of dingy pink chintz as a woman who called herself DiDi perfunctorily rode his cock. It was fine, which was exactly what he told Josto when he asked. Josto had laughed, eyes glassy and his shirt still unbuttoned, flies undone. “Where do you get off being so goddamn choosy?”

After the war, the boys came home and the boys on Don Fadda’s payroll got younger. Raw and ready to prove themselves, Italians who swore allegiance to Betsy Ross and the American dollar, a Smith and Wesson and any other piece of hardware fitted into the palm of their hands. These boys liked to talk, braggadocio and unearned bravado. They knew the pecking order though—they did not talk to Rabbi so much as at him. Around him.

One evening, while Rabbi attended to the last of his tasks at Joplin’s, talk turned to an absent Calamita. “You know what I heard?” one of the boys said. “That man? He fucking eats people.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means what I said, shit for brains. Big C.C. eats people.”

“First of all,” a third interrupted, toothpick hanging out of his mouth, “you ain’t gonna make it far in K.C. if you run around calling Calamita that. Second, that uppity son of a bitch don’t eat nothing but what’s set on a silver platter in front of him with a glass of your finest Chianti and your sister’s panties.”

“Nah,” the second—Shit for Brains—said, “see, you’re the one who’s wrong, on two counts at least, by my tallying. On count the first, the fella’s a stone cold killer. He’d eat the heart outta man without a care for the flatware it’s served with. And as to the second, this guy don’t give two shits about no sister’s panties, let alone any other broad’s.”

The brief silence that followed was deadly. “You saying he’s a queer?”

“All’s I’m saying is, if the glass slipper fits—well, princess,” and he trailed off. He reached for his whiskey. “More likely than a goddamn cannibal, is all.”

“Nuh-uh,” the first boy said. “Calamita the Cannibal, I swear it. Ate a man’s lips right off his face.”

The second man laughed cruelly. “You dumb motherfucker. You choirboy virgin. That ain’t cannibalism. That’s kissing.”

They all laughed.

By summer all three were dead.

They passed their first night in the boardinghouse. Rabbi played at sentry, pacing the room and looking out the window. Each time, there was nothing. The quiet, the stillness of the night. The only movement the snow as it fell.

"What are you looking for?” The kid was already in bed, his shoes set on the rug beside it, ready in the event they needed to leg it. Every now and again panic grabbed at Rabbi; he hadn’t thought through a single aspect of this endeavor, entirely unlike himself. He dropped his hand away from the window and let the curtain resettle over it. He crossed his arms over his chest, against the chill of the room. He had left the oil lamp lit on the small table over by the door yet the room remained dim, shadows reached for them.

Satchel sat up on his elbows. “Is somebody out there?”

Rabbi shook his head. “Never you mind,” he said. “Go on, get your rest.”

He came in from the night, bitterly cold. He entered through the back of the house, like the help. Wasn’t any shame in it, humiliation neither. When you’d never had dignity in your life you didn’t feel sore about missing out on it. At least that was what Rabbi told himself.

Calamita was waiting for him. His face was lit only by his cigarette. Slouched against the wall, he was out of place in the back hallway. He smoked as he always did, unhurried and bored.

“Don’t tell me there’s more doing tonight. I’m all but done in.”

Exhaled smoke obscured Calamita’s face further. “Lazy bones.”

“How was the funeral then?” Rabbi wiped his feet at the back doormat, wrung his fingers in his hands trying to feed some warmth into them.

Calamita shrugged. “The ladies cry, the boss is dead. Food is just fine.”

Fair enough. Rabbi paused. There was no way through the hall past Calamita. Satchel was waiting upstairs. He didn’t like leaving the kid alone for long in this house.

“You gonna tell me what you were waiting for down here, or?”

“Who says I was waiting for you?”

Rabbi scoffed. “Unless you come to the back of the house to pick up a mop or you been carrying on a torrid affair with the housekeeper, I’m having a damned hard time imagining what’d bring you here.” Calamita sniffed, a begrudging expression of humor. He stepped off from the wall and came over to Rabbi.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Come down here, find me with Sylvia. I bend her over the washing machine so you can watch, yeah?”

Before he could think of something clever to say in reply, Rabbi found himself shoved up against the wall. Calamita flicked his cigarette to the floor and his fingers curled tight in the collar of his coat. He could smell the fresh smoke on Calamita; it lingered with the scent of cold that clung to Rabbi nicely.

“And here I’d thought you’d gone off me,” Rabbi tried to joke. “Found someone new to amuse you.” Sometimes, that was what Rabbi hoped for. Someone else to be gifted with Calamita’s attention, what passed for his affection. Other times, he couldn’t imagine anything lonelier. Anything lonelier than he already was.

Calamita made a soft, unimpressed noise. This close, he could hear the bite of a small inhale. Nearly taste it.

“No, no, no.” He pressed the width of his thigh between Rabbi’s, and Christ. He looked past Calamita’s shoulder, nervous. Exposed. Calamita moved his head into Rabbi’s line of sight. “Maybe I am picky. Maybe, I like a filthy mouth that talks back to me as much as it swallows.” He gripped Rabbi by the jaw now, his thumb bearing down along his bottom lip. As ordered, silent as the command might have been, Rabbi obeyed. He opened to him.

Calamita’s face was the only thing above him. For an alarming moment that sat suspended and taunting between them, in the scant space between their faces, their mouths, Rabbi thought he was going to kiss him. Of all the things they had done to each other, that, he knew, would be the worst. You could pardon a great many things, you could resign yourself to even more. But not that.

Calamita did not kiss him. Instead, he spat. He could taste him, nearly as intolerably intimate as if he had kissed him. Made all the worse by the expression on Calamita’s face, the string of spit that connected his mouth to Rabbi’s. Without any intent beyond what his body wanted, Rabbi arched against the wall. Fitted Calamita’s thigh better between his thighs. Hunger was a terrible thing, it trapped a man, it made him want against his better senses. Deny his better angels. Calamita’s hips knocked against Rabbi’s as he pressed him back, pressed himself to him. His mouth was there, he was going to do it, he’d damn himself.

There was a sudden thump from above, the sound of a door opening. With a swipe of his thumb over Rabbi’s wet mouth, Calamita pulled back from him.

The truth was, they rarely ever touched each other. Each time they did, it managed to feel like the first all over again. Violative, destructive, always too much to be characterized as simply pleasure. Always following some act of brutality committed to bodies other than their own.

Calamita would show up in that attic room, intent on taking what he wanted. They were younger then, those early days, and Calamita would hold a hand over Rabbi’s mouth when Rabbi lost himself, got too noisy, his body writhing beneath Calamita’s weight. When he was impatient, when they both were, Calamita liked to fuck his thighs, insubstantial as they were. He’d push them together, shove his cock between the trembling muscle, and all Rabbi could do was ride it out. Remember who he was, who the man was who belonged to the body on top of his. What that could ever possibly make them mean to each other. What it never would.

Rabbi wasn’t with him, when Calamita got shot. Instead, Calamita appeared at his door like the worst sort of apparition, sweating and panting for breath. Bleeding.

“For the love of,” Rabbi started, but Calamita planted a heavy hand down on his shoulder and used him to cross into the room. Rabbi glanced out into the hall, saw the trail of blood he had left behind. “What the hell happened?”

Calamita settled himself down onto the edge of Rabbi’s bed with a grimace and a groan. “I get shot, what d’you think?”

Rabbi shut the door. In one year, Satchel would join Rabbi in this room. In another year, it would be war.

Calamita swore under his breath, his movements nearly graceful as he untucked his shirt. He took the time to unbutton it, neat despite the blood smeared from his hands, the shirt ruined despite his care. Blood continued to seep through the upper leg of his trousers.

Rabbi stood over him, his hands on his hips. A miracle he’d even made it up three flights of stairs to Rabbi’s room. Sheer stubbornness, fairly decent upper body strength, and a solid bannister must have carried him here; no way was he putting any amount of weight on that leg. “You want, I’ll take you down to hospital. Get you fixed up.”

“I am no fucking pussy, Irish.”

“Suit yourself.”

But it was Rabbi who tended to him. He took to his knees between his legs, Rabbi’s left arm bent, holding Calamita’s good thigh open as he saw to the damage done. The bullet had missed anything major, Rabbi could tell that much from the lack of uncontrolled bleeding. He’d seen what a shot to the leg could do to a man, if you hit right. This wasn’t it. He got Calamita’s trousers off, with limited to no help from the man. They caught around his shoes, so, on his knees, Rabbi took those off too. The room was quiet, the radio off, windows closed. Calamita breathed fast but evenly, bearing whatever pain he endured with a stoicism Rabbi had long resented.

Rabbi peeled back the sodden leg of his shorts. The wound was ugly—flesh torn, the blood dark. The bullet was still in him though, no exit wound he could find as his fingers traveled over the back of his thigh. His fingers climbed higher, towards where leg joined buttocks. The leg of his shorts kept unfolding, slipping back down to partially cover the wound. Rabbi gingerly pulled those down too, without comment, his fingers nimble and nearly certain as they undid the line of three buttons. “You’re gonna have to help me here, ‘less you want a bit of misery.” Calamita muttered something under his breath Rabbi did not catch, well-annoyed, but he lifted his hips best he could. Let Rabbi carefully guide the shorts down, over the wound, then off his legs.

There was an echo of the past here. It felt wrong and inevitable in equal measure. The problem, of course, with history was the wide enough swath of time it could cover, the number of transgressions you could fit inside of it. That there always seemed to be room for more.

“You got yourself a souvenir,” Rabbi said, his voice over-loud to his ears. “You’re gonna need a doctor, to get that bullet out.”

Calamita did not look away. His eyes met Rabbi’s and held. “You do it.”

“Fuck off, then.” Something hot and small, the size of a fist, clenched tight in Rabbi’s gut. He didn’t want to give it a name, didn’t want to trust it, so he did neither. “I’d most like kill you for my efforts.”

Calamita’s chest rose as he took a deep breath in, laughed lightly. His grin more of a grimace, teeth and jaw held tight. His undershirt was damp with sweat in the center of his chest, under his arms, more work gone into muscling down through the pain than Rabbi had given him credit for.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Irish?”

Rabbi ignored him. “How’s about I get you fixed, well as I can, and come tomorrow we’ll have a real doc take a gander at the hardware you’re lugging around in that leg of yours, yeah?”

Calamita didn’t say anything, but he didn’t disagree either. So Rabbi cleaned him up. He braced an arm over his hips to hold him down when he tried to rise against the pain of the peroxide and the press of the rag to his raw flesh.

As Rabbi finished, he looked down at the strong, tensed muscle of Calamita’s inner thigh. It jutted out and away from his flesh, a hard line Rabbi could follow. Despite all they’d ever done to each other, always a rushed and furtive thing, Rabbi never got a real look at him. He took his fill now. Everything about Calamita was an exercise in length: long limbs, the stretch of his torso beneath his thin undershirt, the line of his throat as it clicked and swallowed. The cut and span of his hipbone, angled down to his cock, well-matched to the rest of him.

And, then, Rabbi gave in to the rare spontaneous impulse. He pressed his fingertip along the tender edge of the wound. He heard Calamita suck in a sharp breath. Rabbi went further, he slid his finger first along and then in, sinking into the hot and wet of his thigh. Inside the wound. Calamita muffled his mouth, an animal howl that barely left his throat. He did not stop him. Rabbi prodded; he felt, amidst the soft, tight give of Calamita’s body, the solid end of he bullet. Rabbi’s arm was still barred low on his hips, and Rabbi could feel him against the inside of his arm as Calamita pulsed and grew to hardness.

He liked the violation, that was the only conclusion Rabbi could reach.

Rabbi himself was sweating now. He extracted his finger slowly, carefully. Calamita dropped back against the mattress, gasping. His cock did not falter.

That same curiosity that had led Rabbi continued to guide him. Drew his fingers down the reddened length of his cock, his grip loose and unfulfilling. He heard the noise Calamita made, felt the press of his knee and his thigh, his good leg, as it tried to close in around Rabbi’s body. Rabbi continued to hold him open. Rabbi’s fingers traced lower, down to his balls, drawn up to his body, then further. He rubbed the pad of his thumb against his rim.

Calamita’s cock twitched, flush with blood. It slapped against his lower abdomen, as insistent as the rest of him. He groaned. Rabbi blindly reached for the opened first-aid kit. Snatched up the small jar of Vaseline. Looked up; Calamita had managed to raise his upper body off the mattress enough to watch Rabbi. He was breathing hard, eyes dark and reckless, almost as if he could be an entirely different person. No—that wasn’t it. There was still that glint to him, knife-sharp and capable, that was always able to see the worst in Rabbi. Who wanted him to do his worst.

Rabbi’s eyes didn’t leave him as he unscrewed the top of the jar. He slicked his fingers; Calamita’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He said nothing, gave no indication beyond his body’s betrayals this was what he wanted. Rabbi reached back between his legs.

They never did it this way; it was always Rabbi made to open for him. He saw the appeal now. Just as his finger sank into the wound in his thigh, he pushed past his resistance. He was inside him. Calamita painfully rocked his hips into the motion of Rabbi’s finger, his body giving in to him. His body gave around him. Calamita should’ve been clumsier—his leg was held careful and straight, still bleeding no thanks to Rabbi. He rested the majority of his weight on his right hip and leg, his foot braced against the floor as Rabbi added another finger and he bucked yet again. Rabbi pushed deeper. It was as if they both existed in a fugue state. As if, only here, they were separate not only from the rest of the family but the rest of the world. Anything was permitted, anything could be made tolerable.

As Rabbi continued to fuck him, Calamita curled over onto his right side. He was gasping now, each breath sounding like it hurt. Still, he reached down with his left hand and started to touch his own cock, unable to hold off any longer. Rabbi watched him, watched the drip of pre-come over those familiar and exacting fingers, felt the hot clench of his body around his own. He understood it, in his own small way, what it meant to undo another. To leave them helpless and aching and wanting. Perhaps that was why Rabbi gave in, too. He leaned down. He fit his mouth over the wet head of his cock. Distantly, he heard Calamita cry out.

After Satchel came to live with the Faddas, Calamita ignored the kid with a dedication that bordered on cruelty.

Late one night, Rabbi woke to Calamita seated in the room. Quiet, smoking. He sat at the same small table where Rabbi cleaned his gun, where he and the kid ate their dinner of peanut butter sandwiches. His face was limned by the moonlight through the wide window. He sat there like a ghost.

“Christ,” Rabbi whispered. He sat up gingerly, mindful of the bunk over his head. He wiped a hand down his face then up through his hair. Calamita did nothing but smoke, unhurried and uncaring. He lifted an eyebrow when he finally looked at Rabbi.

Rabbi got out of bed. He glanced up; the kid was sleeping, or at least doing a fine job of pretending.

Rabbi gestured to the door, silent, and Calamita rose. He had changed his clothes, since Rabbi last saw him. Earlier in the day, he had come back to the house from the hospital. Boss’s blood was splattered rust brown down the front of his shirt, along the cuffs of his sleeves. Calamita had looked more irritated than anything, tired and annoyed. No grief.

Rabbi shut the door behind the both of them as they stepped out into the hall. “Didn’t wanna wake the kid,” Rabbi said. Calamita shrugged, indifferent.

In the dark hall, it was hard to look at him. See him. Calamita’s attention appeared fixed to the stairs leading below.

“Well, out with it. Must be important, you come drag me outta bed for it.”

Calamita ignored him. He nodded his head back, towards the door. “I like it better, when you sleep alone.”

Rabbi exhaled, near to a laugh. He understood the play now. Calamita was hungry. He’d gone hunting and come up empty-handed. Been awhile. Calamita didn’t reach for him though, and it was never Rabbi who initiated these things between them. He waited to be touched; he did not do the touching. Instead, Calamita did not move. He smoked.

“Boss’s dead,” he said. He made a quick but precise sign of the cross.

Rabbi crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s dead?”

“That is what I say. Boss is dead.” Calamita took another drag off his cigarette. “It is gonna get dicey now.”

Rabbi lifted his head in surprise. It almost sounded like a warning, something you would issue with care.

“Josto’s boss now, yeah?” Rabbi said.

Calamita smirked, the chuckle that followed low and threatening. “That little boy. Baby capo.” He shook his head. “We will see. Maybe,” and his grin was a blade bared in the dark. “Or, maybe everything will change.”

Gaetano arrived the next day.

At the window, Rabbi froze. Even at a distance, he recognized the car making its way down the street.

He crouched down, eye-level with Satchel. “Here’s what you’re gonna do, kid. You’re gonna put your coat on. You’re gonna head downstairs. See to the gal at the front desk—she’ll get you where you need going.”

“What?”

“Get going, I said.” Rabbi flicked his gaze back to the window. The car was no longer on the road. “Run.”

Rabbi couldn’t tell you when he first reached the decision. Might’ve been at Joplin’s at the first, from jump, as he watched the kid shuffle his way to the center of the room. Between the two families. As resigned as anything a young fella such as himself could be resigned to in this world. If Americans were good for anything, it was going about, looking for their reflections in other people, telling themselves when they found it that it must mean that they belonged. Rabbi saw himself in the kid. Of course he did. How couldn’t he. He took the kid by the shoulder and then he took him home and then he never stopped taking him in. He gave the kid what he had always wanted and never got. Maybe that was the way of it. Maybe that was actual love—you gave away what you yourself could never find a way to get.

He’d protect the kid. He’d do what he could. Hang the consequences.

“Go now,” he told the kid. “And If you don’t see me again—”

“You’re dead,” Satchel said quietly.

“Sure. Or in jail.” Rabbi forced a smile Satchel did not return. “Go.”

Only thing left to do now was wait.

He tried to kill him once before. Calamita. It was after the Milligan Massacre, after Rabbi ensured his own birthright was left to bleed out on the dirty floor of Joplin’s alongside his father’s body.

Don Fadda let Rabbi eat with the family that night. He gestured to the seat at his right hand and he said to Rabbi, voice low, gravel-thick, “You have earned it, son.” Rabbi took his seat and for that night and that night only he had a glimpse of a future that would never be his. He would be a son to Don Fadda, Josto would be a brother. They would eat together as a family and maybe somewhere in there he would find if not love then a place for him to belong. Josto sat at the table across from him. He watched Rabbi with what could only be described as impotent and impish hatred—jealousy, maybe. Rabbi ate well that night, and even though he did not speak the language, not well and not fluently, he felt a part of something bigger than himself. Like most things, it was gone by morning.

Not even a month passed before Calamita came for him. Rabbi was casually aware of the internal tumult of the family; it was not the first time that his very presence had been debated and they were not the only family that had considered turning him loose. Getting rid of him. “You are like stray dog.” Don Fadda told him that, early on, back when Calamita would escort Rabbi into Boss’s office. Boss would sit there, comfortably regal behind his desk, and it was in there that they worked to turn him. Now, there was a contingent who wanted him out. “People don’t like a guy who’s willing to kill his dad. It’s not a good look. Ask Shakespeare, probably.” Josto, that time.

Calamita said nothing.

Instead, he waited in Rabbi’s room. And when Rabbi entered, he was on him. He took him down to the floor effortlessly, as if it was something Rabbi’s body had wanted to do but just didn’t know it yet. The fall itself distracted Rabbi enough from the more pressing concern: Calamita’s hands clutched around his throat.

Calamita was calm as he choked him. For once though there was a warmth in his eyes, as he looked down at Rabbi. He loomed above him, backlit by the passing cars in front of the house, near beatific—like one of those paintings in Boss’s office, martyred saints or fallen angels. Rabbi was anything but calm. His legs kicked out, desperate to make contact, failing each time he wriggled and fought.

Calamita made a clicking sound with his tongue. His fingers dug viciously into Rabbi’s throat; Rabbi’s eyes began to tear. “I need to ask you, Irish,” he said, soft like a caress, the very opposite of his hands. “Can I trust you?”

He eased up on his windpipe and Rabbi sucked in a wheezing breath that caught, turned into a hacking cough.

“Yes,” he finally managed to say. He meant it the same way a dying man can mean anything, anything at all, so long as the noose is pulled back over his head.

Calamita looked pleased all the same, but he did not back off. His body still rested heavy on Rabbi. Rabbi did not look away. He watched as Calamita watched him try to take a deep breath in. His lungs burned, his throat raw. Just as every bit of hurt began to clear and register, Calamita’s grip around his neck began to tighten. Rabbi’s hands grabbed at his forearms, blunt nails digging in to his shirtsleeves, the fabric soft and expensive, threatened to give, under his grip.

“Do you trust me?”

Rabbi could barely hear the question over the blood roaring in his head. He didn’t. He shouldn’t. Rabbi was supposed to know better than to trust anybody with anything. He still did it though. Hadn’t he trusted the Faddas enough to kill his own father? His vision was going funny, black spots floating, his grip on Calamita beginning to falter. He tried to think. No, it wasn’t that you couldn’t trust anybody. It was that you had to trust, just a little, when it came to making your play.

He let his hands drop. He could not speak. He let his body say the rest.

Rabbi waited. He heard the floorboards in the boardinghouse creak and give beneath the heavy tread over them. He had not locked the door after Satchel left; there was no surprise when it opened.

“I knew it would be you.”

Calamita grinned. He closed the door, stood there with it at his back. “You are a fortune teller now, yes? Then you can see what’s coming.”

“I seen what’s coming for a long while now, Calamita.”

Calamita took a step into the room. “Where’s the boy?”

Rabbi snorted. “Nah, you know better than that. Tell me you know better than that, I’m liable to be right disappointed otherwise.”

Calamita pulled off his gloves, one finger at a time. “You think you do this little boy a favor? Take him away from his papa? The life he made for him to live?”

“Yes. Yes, I most certainly do.”

“You think it is good because no one did it for you. No one rescued poor little Irish.”

“In this economy, most folks don’t go in for rescue. I know this. It’s nothing personal.”

He caught the brief movement of Calamita’s head. Cocked, as if receiving a signal Rabbi had no idea he had sent. Interest, perhaps. His eyes were cold though, serious.

Rabbi sat down at the small table to the side of the room, near to both Calamita and the door. He was trying to buy himself a little time, futile as the effort was. He figured if it had to go this way, he would make Calamita work for it. Sort his own play, if there was a play to be had now other than self-defense.

“Josto know you’re here?” That was an angle worth trying on. Calamita, he knew, had little allegiance to anyone but himself. Gaetano, Josto—he’d serve whoever would get him what he wanted most. But, there it was: hadn’t that always been the mystery, at least to Rabbi? What did Calamita want? What was he ever hoping to gain?

“He knows I am looking for you,” Calamita finally said.

“He send you to off me?”

“He send me to take care of it.”

“Right. Nothing personal.”

That strange look had returned to Calamita’s face. He had taken off his coat. With a disdainful look, he draped it on the hook beside the door. He placed his hat neatly on top of it. He stilled his movement, his back to Rabbi. He did not look at Rabbi when he spoke.

“It has always been very personal for me, when it comes to you.”

It was Rabbi who went still then. He did nothing as he watched Calamita pull the chair opposite him away from the table. He sat. He was very much himself again, on the precipice of violence.

“You make a big mess for Boss, you know.” He wagged a finger at Rabbi. “You make things hard for me, you make bad choices like that, Irish. Taking the boy, turning traitor. You kill Antoon, kill Mario. Scare Naneeda like that.”

“It was the only play worth making. I won’t apologize for it.”

Calamita shrugged, studied in its casualness. “I am not asking for sorry. But maybe—maybe you are right. There are no good choices in this life. Not for us.”

“No. Maybe not. But you wanna talk bad, let’s.” Rabbi leaned in. "You didn’t have to make the plays you made, and you know it. You didn’t have to go for Cannon’s boy. You didn’t have to kill their consigliere. You made this war happen. You did.”

“Yes. I did.”

“And for what? We coulda had peace.” Calamita’s _hah_ only made him angrier, more certain. He leaned further forward, tapped his fingers to the table for emphasis. “We coulda done—we coulda had peace, longer than we got.”

“No. We could not.”

“The old boss saw to it.”

“The old boss was old.”

Rabbi ignored him. He had long known the fruitlessness of it, the unbearable repetitive cycle of it all. It wasn’t just the children who got swapped, but the families too. Flush, then down. On top, then out. What was the Hawthorne he’d had Satchel read, months back? _The truth is, that once every half-century, at least, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget its ancestors_. Maybe he was on to something.

Rabbi held to his argument all the same. “That was a choice he made, and a choice you shoulda honored. We could have had peace.”

“You do not listen! Peace? It is just a pause.” Calamita lurched forward, venomous. “It’s a—it’s a, an intervallo, between one act and the next. Not even fifty years into this century, yes? Two world wars. How many more we gonna get before the new century comes, huh? In this country, you take it if you want to have it. Nobody gives you nothing. You know this. I know you know this. And I see no reason to wait to take what I want. To, uh,” he settled back into his chair, searching for the words, the emotion leaving his voice, “put off the inevitable.”

Quiet settled between them.

“And yet, here you are,” Rabbi said after a moment. “Putting off the inevitable.”

Calamita’s mouth twitched. He finally broke eye contact. He unfolded himself slowly as he got to his feet, equally lithe and lethal. Rabbi stood as well.

“You are ready then?”

“End of the road, isn’t it?” Rabbi said, more glib than he felt. His heart was pounding fast. He was out of options. His only hope was for Calamita to pull a gun on him, and even then he’d have to be fast enough to either wrest the gun from him or dart out of range. If it was the knife, it was over for him. “I have been waiting, yes.” And it was the truth. He couldn't say when he knew it for fact rather than from superstition or idle fear. Calamita would come for him. They would kill each other. When the time came, he would kill him. It was only a matter of time.

It was now.

As always, Calamita moved quickly. A snap of his wrist and Rabbi saw the flash of Calamita’s knife, familiar in every way save for this. It pierced first his shirt and then his flesh, tore into his gut vicious and inarguable, now intimately known. Calamita dug in and twisted until his knuckles brushed against Rabbi’s shirt front; he didn’t register it. The knife was in him to the hilt. The pain was fantastic—he couldn’t help but moan with it, knees buckling, his body going slack in Calamita’s grip.

Calamita was out of breath, wild-eyed and nearly frantic. He was usually so calm during a kill, Rabbi thought dimly. He grabbed for Rabbi, held him to him, more tender than he could ever recall him touching him before. One hand clutched around his jaw, forcing Rabbi’s head up, to look him in the face, as his other arm held his weight. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. Rabbi used his distraction to his meager advantage. He pulled the knife out of himself, the resistance his own, a small animal cry escaping him as the blood ran down freely. Clumsily, his hand slick, but no less effective, he slotted the blade into Calamita.

There was no real aim to his strike, so he struck again. He was looking for flesh, looking for give, and beneath his ribs, he found it. Calamita gasped, body heaving. The curious part of it—if he had more time to think, if time could stop, even if only for a moment—was that Calamita did not try to stop him. He went on holding his body to his.

Rabbi pulled the knife free and Calamita sagged, the wood floor beneath them slippery with their blood. Rabbi tossed the knife aside with a clatter. They both went down to the floor together in a heap.

Calamita rolled away, onto his back. When he laughed, the sound came out choked and gargled. He held a careful hand to one of his wounds. Blood seeped out easily, his hand covered in it. “You motherfucker,” he said, still laughing.

Rabbi lay his head back on the floor with a sigh. He felt nauseous and cold. His mind was flickering, as if out of his grasp. He thought of the kid. He wished him well. Better than this. That he’d know better love than Rabbi could gather for himself.

He felt Calamita lurch towards him. His hand fastened to Rabbi’s leg, both pulling him across the floor and pulling his own body over Rabbi’s. It was a misery. He should’ve goaded Calamita better to make this quick. Bullets would have been better. A slit throat. Rabbi looked down his body at Calamita’s face, resting heavy now on his hip, close to the wound he made. He was pale, the O brand stark against his skin. He thought about reaching down and tracing the shape of it. He didn’t move.

“I am not sorry,” Calamita managed to say.

Rabbi wanted to close his eyes, so he did. “No. Why would you be.” He felt a heavier weight on his thigh, the pant leg wet with his own blood, with Calamita’s. He forced his eyes open to find Calamita had hauled his own body onto Rabbi’s. No more fight in him. Or, not enough.

The width of Calamita’s hand closed over Rabbi’s wound and pressed down. Rabbi squirmed under him, made a caught noise.

“Patrick.”

Rabbi coughed, or he laughed. It hurt. He tasted blood. “Fuck off. You killed him.” He sucked in a breath. That hurt, too. “You killed that boy long ago.”

And that was all it was, after everything. Two men bleeding out together in a small rented room in a small town neither of them would ever call home. In a country that had never wanted them. Any hope Rabbi had left he’d consigned to the kid.

There was distant noise in the building, as if they were once more inside the Fadda house, tucked away from anyone else. Again, he thought of the kid. But it was himself he saw, a boy, running from the very first. He ran through the snow and the ice and he did not stop. A great wide country, and he would find a different box for them to put him in.

He tried to watch Calamita’s face, his eyes heavy-lidded, unfocused. He remembered the drive here, Satchel in the passenger seat. A snowy road, treacherous with ice. The kid beside him, still reaching for if not safety then reassurances. It was hard to brake; the car wanted to continue forward. It was then a rabbit skittered out into the road. The car fishtailed, but it stopped. So did the rabbit.

Rabbi’s breath was coming slower now, but so was Calamita’s. He could feel it. He pictured the rabbit, the snow. In the road it had stopped, but then it began to run again.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: canon-typical and period-typical attitudes towards race, ethnicity and homosexuality; violence and/or attempted murder as dubious expression of love???; wound fingering and unhygienic wound care as foreplay; dubious consent due to power dynamic; ambiguous/open-ended major character death(s).


End file.
